Björk Black Lake Digital Terrain

xRez Studio had the great pleasure of providing digital terrain capture for Björk’s recent special venue film “Black Lake”, featured at MoMA NYC in her retrospective exhibition in spring 2015 and directed by the gifted designer and director Andrew Thomas Huang . The effort consisted of capturing several locations shot for the film, including a dark, narrow lava tube cave, a volcanic ravine, an open moss-covered plain, and various set pieces on stage. The creation of digital facsimiles of these locations allowed the post work done at Wolf + Crow to allow more flexible CG backplates, integration with Houdini effects elements, and direct use for subsequent VR pieces. Every method xRez employs was used, from carbon pole and UAV photogrammetry, laser scanning with Faro scanners, spherical gigapixel panoramas, time lapse fulldome skies, etc. Special thanks to Andrew Thomas Haung, Tamsin Glasson, Brian Pene of Autodesk, Andrew Melchior, and of course Björk.

The following video describes the aerial acquisition and resultant 3d model:

[vimeo]https://vimeo.com/129563370[/vimeo]

Making of Blacklake

[youtube]https://youtu.be/tnnELMSiUFI?t=6m19s[/youtube]

Here is the final Blacklake piece

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YGn1pJIpZw8[/youtube]

The ravine and moss photogrammetric model can also be seen extensively in this work for the “Family” cut from Vulnicura:

[vimeo]https://vimeo.com/122258599[/vimeo]

Our process began with an early test for capturing terrain and integrating a Björk double into a possible fulldome theatre scenario: